Parallels Plesk 9.x is leaps and bounds ahead of Plesk 8.x in terms of features, ease of use, and stability. Parallels is continuing this trend in Plesk 9.5 by improving stability and security in Plesk 9.5 which releases on March 11.
According to Craig Bartholomew, Vice President of Panel Products, the main goals of Plesk 9.5 were to improve security by introducing PCI compliance and improve overall reliability.
“Hosting customers value security, and those doing ecommerce transactions want to be able to easily pass PCI scans. Plesk 9.5 is the most secure and supportable version ever. Parallels stands behind it with free Transfer, Installation, and Migration support.” 
Hot Fix Updates.
It’s no secret that Plesk users are most concerned with security and updates that don’t break the system. In order to be secure, you need to update your control panel whenever a new version arrives. I have personally experienced corrupt databases and other odd issues when trying to upgrade to a newer version of Plesk. Frustrating to say the least.
Plesk 9.5 sports a new hot fix update system that addresses the age old ‘breaking’ of Plesk panel upgrades. In my opinion, this update is worth its weight in gold. If you’ve been using another control panel due to this, you might want to take a look at the new Plesk 9.5.
Security.
Realizing that most small businesses need to be PCI compliant, and that most hosting consumers require PCI compliant environments, Parallels has brought PCI Compliance to Plesk 9.5. Web Hosts should be very interested in this feature as it can be a nice selling point for small business clients.
In addition to security and reliability, many new features have been added. So what else has been added?
Google Tools Integration.
Now Web designers and Web hosts can utilization Google Tools while logged in to Plesk. Google Tools integration also allows Hosts and designers to monetize customer sites by offering clients sponsored search through their existing web pages. Parallels demonstrated the Google Tools integration and it was very easy to use. Users without a Google Tools account are able to easily create one from within the control panel itself.
Suite version now available.
Plesk 9.5 introduces a new licensing option called the Plesk 9.5 Suite. The Suite version release will include Plesk 9.5 Unlimited domain license, Parallels Billing 1000 User license and Parallels Site Builder 100-domain license. Best yet, pricing is the same as the regular Plesk 9.5 unlimited domain license version making this great value for Web Designers and small Web Hosts.
Support.
Free support is now included for installations, migration assistance, or upgrades from previous versions of Plesk. This is great news for small Web Hosts, however, it is not all-inclusive support. Anything lying outside of the basic install, migration, or upgrade will require paid support unless you are a Parallels partner.
Our wish list for future versions of Plesk is simple: Speed.
Page load times within Plesk have always been an issue. In comparison to cPanel, Plesk control panels load much slower. Clients can wait a long time for page loads in the control panel. Slow loads can be quite annoying when you have a lot of work to be done. Web designers and web hosts often bear the brunt of the slow page load times when their customers complain.
The good news is that Parallels says speed is on their radar and they expect to resolve this issue by the end of the year with a new AJAX based Plesk version. We think when the speed issue is resolved Parallels will have a cPanel killer on its hands.
Good post, we find plesk is the second choice (aside from cPanel) because it is not user friendly. We need skins which make the Plesk functionality more usable.